Happiness Is Not Dependent on Activity

I went to yoga this week after a long absence. I knew my flexibility and balance would be tested. I also know that yoga is a personal thing:  "This is your practice” the instructor frequently reminds us. But, I can’t help noticing the others. Usually, most of them are more advanced than I. This time, everyone was much more agile and far more graceful.

But, creaks, tightness, and all, I am grateful for my body and abilities. I am upright and mobile. I can still do everything that I love -- bike, swim, and kayak (okay, I need some help getting in and out). And, I can still do household chores.

My gratefulness comes from a friend’s example. Last week, I got closer view of what it’s like to be disabled. A longtime friend, who suffers from post-polio syndrome, was in town. She arrived in her kitted-out minivan with an electric ramp and power wheelchair.

Post-polio syndrome is not uncommon for individuals who were stricken with polio.  Decades after the initial polio illness it can cause weakness, pain, fatigue, and muscle atrophy. Physically, my friend is not the person I met 35 years ago. But, while her stamina and endurance may be limited, her spark and spirit seem limitless.

She powered over our doorstep into our home and back into our lives.

Other guests during her visit ranged in age from 8 to 68.  Our “disabled” friend took over the rainy day activity planning and coordinated a trip to the nearby science center. She was firm; we must see all the exhibits and stay for the planetarium show to see a movie about astronauts.

Like a seated Mary Poppins, she was prepared, brisk, and effective. She’d arrived early and seemed to know everyone on the staff.  She powered through the exhibits providing an implicit invitation to see her world, if only briefly and superficially. Not every doorway was easily accessible – the opening would be too narrow or the door lacked the needed pushbutton. A remodeled 1927 school, the science center had no ramps. The routes were circuitous. For her to get between floors required a cramped wheelchair lift and a museum staffer’s help.

So, yes, it was a perspective I’d never had, on being dependent on sensible and accessible design and on the immense contributions of the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990 (www.ada.gov).

My friend, with her vibrancy, is aging as gracefully as anyone I know. As for me, with my dependence on activity and endorphins and fresh air, I need to take note of her approach. 

I like how the late Hugh G. Gallagher, another polio (as polio survivors call themselves; the plural is polios), put it.  This author and activist, among many other accomplishments (Gallagher wrote FDR’s Splendid Deception about President Roosevelt’s polio history), wrote:

“Polios have a certain advantage over the able-bodied when it comes to aging…. We do not confuse the quality of our life with the quality of our tennis game. We know that happiness is not dependent upon activity nor is meaningful defined by trophies. A meaningful life may be hampered—but need not be defined—by pain or disability.” —Hugh G. Gallagher, 1998

Hampered, not defined. Wow.

Will I remember my friend’s example and Gallagher’s perspective when the bike is left to rust, the kayak on loan, and going swimming means walking in the pool?

I hope so.

Friends and Furrows

I have sleep apnea. That’s not unusual. As I know from my last job (National Transportation SafetyBoard), where fatigue figured into so many deadly crashes and collisions, about 12 percent of Americans have sleep disorders. The disorders are more prevalent among older people.

I have that, too. 

According to the sleep doctor at my last appointment, if I were to lose 10 percent of my body weight I would have an 80 percent chance of saying, “Farewell apnea.” That’s a lot of math, but I’m working on it. Six percent and counting.

Meanwhile, I sleep tethered to a CPAP machine on my nightstand. I’m used to it, but it’s damned inconvenient when traveling – schlepping it, of course – and the machines are so commonplace (we, the  disordered can spot the other CPAP bags on airport security conveyor belts) that the Transportation Security Administration seems convinced our machines are the next new thing in hiding explosives. Yes, it is embarrassing when an agent removes the machine from its case and plugs it in to make sure it works. 

Another thing about machine-assisted slumber is that the CPAP nosepiece straps leave grooves, like furrows in a field, across my face. I look scary enough in the morning. Now I am groovy as well.

When I worked I was self-conscious about my grooves, but the time between awaking, getting ready for work (remember work attire?), and commuting (often a bike ride across the National Mall – glorious!) gave time for the moisture cream to kick in and the cheek furrows to fade. If I drove and my commute was faster, strategically lowered reading glasses worked as well as any concealer.

As I retiree, I can be a recluse until the fullness of time returns my cheeks to normal. But, there’s a big exception, especially with the Carolina springtime when our friends are becoming like swallows returning to Capistrano.

Which is great. I love all the swallows arriving from Maryland and Miami and Michigan.

Houseguests are a joy of retirement. When you work, friendship, if maintained, might be a quick lunch, a phone call (often while driving, shopping, cooking, or folding laundry), hasty emails, “likes” on Facebook, or, when you really plan, a night out.

All good. And, all help maintain vital connections. But, in retirement you have more time and, if you’re lucky, more energy. You can focus on friends. Best yet, you can host them. Then you can be with them and not try to cram all the updates into one exchange.  With houseguests, it’s a conversation, not a quiz.

We’ve got a vegetable garden now. Just as there was a marriage analogy in assembling our IKEA furniture, I’m sure there’s an analogy in our garden for friendship, like paying attention, providing nourishment, and taking time.

It’s more than time with houseguests. It's recapturing the friendship you had when you were young -- before careers and children and responsibilities. You can play. Really play. With many friends that means word games. In my life, I have not played as many games of Bananagrams as I did last weekend.

With visiting friends it’s can be almost like being a child again.  Games. Giggles. Gossip.

Except you have some aches and pains and issues and in the morning it's a furrowed hostess who is making the coffee. That’s right. Nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide. In the bright light of our sunroom, the reading glasses trick is transparent. 

But, it’s okay. Somehow in retirement I seem to be becoming more of the person I really am and not just the young one I frequently tried to project to be world. I am old. And, maybe, just maybe, I am groovy, too.

                                            Simon and Garfunkel, 59th Street Bridge Song

It's Not Easy Being Blue

I am frantic. I have been searching everywhere for one of my most prized possessions. I’m sure it survived the move. After all, it has accompanied me from California to Maryland, to Washington, DC, and then back to Maryland and DC and then to Virginia.

It must be here. Somewhere.

“It” is a letter my grandfather – Daddy Bob, we called him – wrote to me in 1969. I was a college freshman, and yes, likely full of myself. My father had sent his father a paper I’d written for a political science class. As I recall, I was a budding socialist.

The 90-year-old patriarch jumped into action and wrote a long handwritten letter chiding me, pointing out the errors of my arguments, and defending, no, extolling the accomplishments of FDR, the New Deal and government programs that helped those unable to help themselves.

Daddy Bob was more than an observer; he had been a Texas delegate to the Democratic National Convention that first nominated FDR in 1932.

I swear the third man from the left is Daddy Bob.

Yet, I’m a mixed breed, as other Lone Star relatives have been quick to point out. My mother’s grandfather ran for Congress in Texas as a Republican. But, the women in her family were all Democrats.

For me, it’s long been easy to be a Democrat once I left California’s Orange County and went to college (ah, the ‘60s). From there it was – with my grandfather’s letter in tow – to Maryland (blue state), DC (very blue), and then to Virginia’s Arlington County (deep blue).

The parties haven’t always been so rigidly color-coded. The blue and red shorthand came in 2000 while chads hung in Florida and our nation’s future hung in the Supreme Court’s scales of justice. [For a great article on red, blue, G.O.P. and Democrats, see Smithsonian Magazine.]

Last August, before we left blue Arlington for NC’s Catawba County, good Re(d)publican friends took us to dinner. The wife said, “Now you’ll be able to understand how it is for us living in Arlington.”

Those words echo.

To paraphrase Kermit, “It’s not easy being blue.”

At least it’s not here, where signs sprouting alongside the daffodils boast about being the conservative candidate.  There are no signs for Democrats; there are not enough candidates to require a primary.

You can’t watch television with being swamped by political ads. For one, the Koch brothers have poured some $7 million into North Carolina to defeat Sen. Kay Hagan.

Of my new state, Jeffrey Toobin wrote in a recent issue (Feb. 17 & 24, 2014) of The New Yorker, “Few states have undergone as profound a political transformation as North Carolina has in recent years. In the 2010 midterm elections, the North Carolina Senate and its House of Representatives went from Democratic to Republican control.”

In 2012, Pat McCrory, a Republican, won the governorship, the G.O.P. won more seats in both houses, and, Toobin continued, “the Republicans went on a legislative tear, ending benefits for the long-term unemployed, declining the expansion of Medicaid offered by the Affordable Care Act, and cutting taxes and government spending, especially for education.” (The state now spends $475 less per student than just a few years ago.)

And, that was followed by numerous changes, or “reforms,” to voting, including reduced early voting and strict voter-I.D. requirements, which is why the U.S. Department of Justice filed its lawsuit last September.

With my minority status, I find myself thinking more about what it means to be a Democrat. Like Daddy Bob, I was raised left-handed and left leaning. But, it’s more about the values my parents instilled. I was brought up to believe in equality and fair treatment, to value everyone, and to help others who are in need.

I like how Doug Wilson, political director for North Carolina's State Democratic Party, puts it, “Democrats don’t believe in handouts. We believe in a helping hand.”

What I don’t like is what I see happening in my new home state:  the cuts to education, one in five women living in poverty, and that our county is #1 in losing young people since there’s so little opportunity here.

We – and that we means government – must invest in our people and their stronger futures.

That’s why I started going to Catawba County Democratic Party meetings. It’s why I signed up as a charter member of the newly formed women’s auxiliary and it’s why, when no one else stepped forward, I agreed to be the group’s president.

My desire to contribute and give back is also why I put on a white wig and called on my Texas heritage to portray the late great Ann Richards in our group’s inaugural “Lunch With Legends” fundraiser. I stood tall with some remarkable women and I’m not just talking about Barbara Jordan, Rosa Parks, Jacqueline Kennedy, Shirley Chisholm, Susan B. Anthony, and Sojourner Truth. I’m talking about the charter members of the Democratic Women of Catawba County.

With company like this, it’s not as hard to be blue.

Left to right: Ola Greenard, Lynn Dorfman, Lois Daniel, Carol Hanes,
10th District Congressional candidate Tate MacQueen, Denise Lineberger, Fran Syptak, and Toni Woods